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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs XLCubed comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (5th)
XLCubed
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (30th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is designed for BI (Business Intelligence) Tools and holds a mindshare of 3.7%, down 5.3% compared to last year.
XLCubed, on the other hand, focuses on Reporting, holds 0.3% mindshare, up 0.3% since last year.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

Declan Dempsey - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides efficient data reporting while needing easier deployment and improved interface
Users tend to put everything into Excel, though I try to discourage this. The best feature about it for me, and for them, is the fact that you have a universe that is well made. This means you don't have those months that get assigned. You can just get to the point and get a report very quickly. Unfortunately, in some ways, it's a double-edged sword because it becomes more of a self-service ETL, even for the reporting team. If you have a decent universe and you just want to quickly get something together, it's very usable. Compared to Click, you can drop those reports very quickly.
it_user1391316 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cost effective with great capability, performance, flexibility and visuals
In general, we're happy with the solution but we're always looking to see what else is out there. The thing we've struggled with is our partnership with Tagetik UK, the consultants, and the issue we had gaining access to consultants to develop the solution on our behalf. Thankfully we connected directly with XLCubed and now have a pretty close and good relationship with them so the earlier problem we had of actually getting resources to help us develop has now been solved. One of the things that we've been asking for and would like as an additional feature is a sort of benchmarking functionality. The ability to be able to benchmark, directly against the company digital corporate numbers. That said, there seems to be improved functionality within the latest release that could help us develop that further.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Ease of report development is a key feature."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform outperforms all other tools such as Power BI and Tableau, showing more accuracy, reliability, and flexibility compared to all other BI tools worldwide."
"We find the product to be very stable."
"The ability to merge dimensions in a report is great."
"To share a metadata service layer, you don't need to add a user or write a SQL query. Instead, you can present a raw database to your end user."
"The platform uses a lot of Java technologies so the performance and system-level management are tricky because it needs a lot of resources."
"​It is a very good product, stable, and has good technical capabilities.​"
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is definitely scalable."
"Great capability, performance, flexibility, visuals, and the solution is also very cost effective."
"I am looking forward to testing their full graphics that are available, as they looked very interesting in the demo."
 

Cons

"Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex."
"The biggest area for improvement would be the dashboarding capabilities due to the recent change from Xcelsius to Dashboard Designer. This has created a gigantic ripple in many companies because the skill sets required are drastically different."
"I would like to see their data visualization products enhanced and made more robust and easier to implement."
"Recently, it's become less stable if I am working on Citrix."
"Technical support may not always be timely or effective."
"The user interface should be easier to use and navigate."
"It would be good if they could integrate the possibility for end users to create end models for themselves that they can use, especially for site operators, and if they could provide the end user not only the self-service BI, but also the self-service analytics, based on a predefined model, the same way that Oracle did."
"The admin features for disk space management need work. It's very difficult to manage the disk space by the application; good admin features and not included to allow you to do that. I don't believe that is in the latest version of the product either."
"Would like the ability to be able to benchmark."
"There should be a better or an easier way to establish that connection to external sources."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
"Its price is fair."
"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."
"​It is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 users."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"It has an option of a Cloud Platform (SAP Analytics Cloud) which has a lower price than the on-premise platform, and you can buy individual licences per user.​"
"We purchase licenses through Epic. So, we get an Epic price as opposed to the SAP price. If we were going to use other products like Webby that they offer or exclusively use BI Launch Pad, it would cost a lot because half of our employees would touch it in some fashion. So, we use Epic-Crystal integration to keep the licensing cost down. I believe the BI Launch Pad licensing is something like $800 for each, and the Crystal Report licensing is something like $500 for each, but that's not what we pay."
"14,000 Pounds per year for licensing."
"I am still using the two-week trial, but at first sight, the price is reasonable."
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Comparison Review

it_user6663 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 25, 2013
SAP Business Objects vs. Microsoft BI
A quick look at the whole idea on another weblogs gives you a sense that all of them just talked about very brief things like report refresh feature in BO or cube feature in MS Analysis Service. I choose MS BI and I want to share my reasons and opinions on why I choose it and give you another quick…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualization and analysis?
Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it consta...
What do you like most about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform?
What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process.
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Also Known As

SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Marshalls Ltd, BP Exploration and Production, Thorntons, Ted Baker, Bristol-Myers, Rank Group, ING Bank Genve, Cargill Value Investment, Chloride Power, Auchan, Erste, UEFA, Novartis, Porsche Informatik, Raiffeisen Bank International
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. XLCubed and other solutions. Updated: July 2022.
851,823 professionals have used our research since 2012.